Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot had a similar quirk to their literary careers: after penning their respective masterpieces — Jane Eyre for Brontë in 1847, Middlemarch for Eliot in 1871 — both lived to publish deeply strange and religiously preoccupied novels a half-decade later. While the Jewish mysticism and Wagnerian scope of Eliot’s Daniel Deronda have prompted reams of scholarship, and its melodrama and finely-wrought heroine have broken through to popular consciousness, Brontë’s final published novel has met with relatively muted fanfare. Few beyond Brontë completists, academics, eccentrics, and those otherwise in-the-know seem to read Villette these days, let alone consider its aesthetic and ideological contours. Its heroine, Lucy Snowe, is criminally under-celebrated. The novel possesses a kind of secret-handshake status, seeming to subsist by virtue of the whispered interpersonal recommendation. This state of affairs is perhaps unsurprising, since Villette rings a dissonant chord in the annals of Victorian fiction. A rough summary of the novel goes something like this. A Protestant Englishwoman, poor, friendless, and plain, crosses the channel to the fictional kingdom of Labassecour; there, surrounded by French-speaking Catholics, she becomes an English teacher and eventually headmistress of her own school. Despite its inoffensive Bildungsroman-like frame, Villette was regarded with distaste from the start, disliked for the morbidity of its “unamiable” protagonist, as a contemporary take in the Dublin Review put it; for its hints of perversity; and for its mood of pungent defiance. Brontë had partly modeled the tale after a wretched year spent in Brussels in 1843. There she had herself been friendless, had been dizzyingly alone, had pined fiercely after her charismatic — and married — professor. Perhaps the novel’s early readers could smell its author’s acute bitterness. Perhaps they, like Virginia Woolf a century later, shrank from that “jerk in [Brontë’s novels], that indignation” rendering them “deformed and twisted.” Woolf seems to have preferred Villette to Jane Eyre. Yet unlike Jane Eyre, which wears its turn to the domestic on its sleeve (“reader, I married him”), Villette “jerks” its reader still further, permanently deferring marriage for its female lead and closing instead with an ambiguous evocation of shipwreck. On this score the novel is certainly an outlier, most comfortably framed as an exception that proves the rule of Victorian novels. Villette’s deafeningly absent marriage plot, along with the “hideous . . . convulsed” spirit that so baffled and disgusted its contemporaries — those were Matthew Arnold’s words in a letter, calling the novel “one of the most utterly disagreeable books I ever read” — were seized on in the twentieth century by second-wave feminist critics. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, in The Madwoman in the Attic, set the tone, seeing in Lucy a casualty of patriarchal constraint, and scholarship since has tended to follow suit. Brenda R. Silver pointed to the sphere of readerly sympathy as a form of surrogate-liberation for the novel’s protagonist, and Joseph Allen Boone maintained his predecessors’ language of empowerment and subversion. These canonical responses to the novel have tended to prefer an essential, autonomous self, which is either being oppressed and disfigured or else requires some kind of emancipation (if only at the hands of a congenial reader). They have also largely sidestepped the question of religion, consigning Villette’s Catholic theme to a peripheral position or glossing over it entirely. Brontë’s final published novel scalds the fingertips and sharpens the mind, and it deserves to be grasped by different means and with different language. One should not take for granted that its protagonist desires autonomy as we might understand it, nor should one see the religious dynamic in the novel as simply an intriguing sideshow. Though indebted to the aforementioned readings, I see Lucy differently — as in some sense in flight from subjectivity, especially in its self-contained and autonomous Protestant mold, and in search of forms of release, mediation, externalization, even annihilation — experiences that the novel codes Catholic. Lucy seems often to find unfettered interiority an impossible burden to bear, to be drawn to a paradoxical “freedom not to consent,” in Julia Kristeva’s words. This tendency is most apparent in the frequent irruption of ecstatic states in Villette: ecstasy becomes the novel’s structural principle, contributing to its murky religious aesthetic. The tendency then appears to regroup in the realm of erotic love, to channel itself into a relationship that annihilates private inwardness. While Lucy first pines after a Protestant doctor, she ultimately emotionally entangles herself with an imperious Catholic man. Why should a nineteenth-century English novel, with the genre’s overriding concern with selfhood and development, be interested in experiences that nullify, deflate, or otherwise jettison selfhood, albeit temporarily? And why should Catholicism be the terrain upon which questions of selfhood are pursued? It is tempting to speculate that Lucy’s Catholic fantasy life evinces a need to transcend a Protestant-cum-secular, perhaps bourgeois, conception of the individual — a need to transcend the conditions of the novel in which she finds herself. Indeed, in its fascination with the Catholic question, its scorn for cheerful individualism, and its appeal to the mystique of authority, the novel chimes with some of the louder Catholic-talk in our own intellectual air today. The much-covered rise of “tradcath” aesthetics and ideology need not be rehashed here, but consider it distilled by the New York Times headline of a few years back: “New York’s Hottest Club is the Catholic Church.” Paper of record aside, many of us have by now encountered the type: those who, afflicted with the malaise of the secular, have been drawn to the Catholic Church in part through the medium of ideology. (I observe the phenomenon without contempt, gathering that many such cases are on-ramps to genuine conversion or even constitutive of it.) Yet one senses, in some prominent cases, that religion and the culture war have mingled behind a curtain of mist — that the worldview in question consists mainly in a post-liberal pull toward unfreedom. Is Lucy Snowe an early prototype of this phenomenon? A woman who suffered secular
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